People think of Europe as transit heaven and the US as a backwater, but it wasn’t always that way. The US fundamentally developed urban public transit, and in public transit’s first 100 years, no country had equal service to that provided in the US. (1/5)
Public transportation in NYC, primarily ferries and horse drawn carriages, was better in 1833 than any other world city, and likely better than any city in the US today. Headways were frequently less than 2 minutes, and reports exist of headways of 15 seconds at some stops. (2/5)
By the mid 1880s, there were 415 street railway companies in the United States operating over 6000 miles of track and carrying 188 million passengers a year, or about 12 rides per year for every person in a city with more than 2500 people. (3/5)
By comparison, the combined 1875 ridership of Paris, London, Vienna, and Berlin was half of what it was for NYC. Tokyo, the city with the world’s premier transit system today, didn’t have a single horsecar until 1882, 50 years after the first estadounidense steam rail. (4/5)
Moral of the story: the way we all drive about in single occupancy cars was never our fate - we changed our destiny and chose a new future for ourselves. We can do the same today. (5/5)
